


see me through this wild tide

by PipTheMagnificent



Series: Zutara Week 2020 [5]
Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Angst, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, F/M, One-sided Aang/Katara (Avatar), Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Slow Burn, Zuko is an Awkward Turtleduck, Zuko teaching Katara to drive
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-07-30
Updated: 2020-07-30
Packaged: 2021-03-05 21:46:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,121
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25612291
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PipTheMagnificent/pseuds/PipTheMagnificent
Summary: Six months. That's how long it's been since the crash. Six months since Kya died, since Katara stopped using cars to get around, since her world was turned upside down. But six months is a long time to hold all that hurt in, and Katara starts to find comfort in an unexpected place: with Zuko, Aaang's bully turned friend turned, apparently, to her makeshift therapist and eventual driving teacher.
Relationships: Katara/Zuko (Avatar)
Series: Zutara Week 2020 [5]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1849897
Comments: 10
Kudos: 33





	see me through this wild tide

**Author's Note:**

> This work was inspired and begun for Zutara Week Day 5, Hesistancy. It's sort of a stretch, but Katara is hesitant to get in a car again, so...
> 
> Title is from Maggie Roger's On + Off, which is a splendid song I recommend for everyone!

The windows were open, blowing in that Indian summer wind and whipping Katara’s hair all around. It’s a perfect day, sunny and warm, and the trees overshadowing the road are lush and green, just starting to get a hint of yellow in the highest leaves.

Katara taps her hands on the dashboard to the beat of the song playing on the radio. Their old beat up minivan isn’t good enough to have one of those screens to play music, so they are confined to whatever the radio decides to play. Today, they’ve been lucky, and the song that’s playing is one of Katara and her mom’s favorites.

The chorus starts playing, and Katara belts it out, sharing a smile with her mom Kya, who is nodding her head and singing along.

“Oh oh dancing with myself!” Katara hams it up, shaking her head like she’s at a party. “Oh oh dancing with myself!”

The sun sets the dust motes in the car alight, and Katara’s skin is sticking to the seat from the heat, but it’s okay, because soon they’ll be pulling into Whale Tail Icecream and ordering the most chocolatey sundaes they have. It’s tradition for Kya and Katara to get ice cream on the first day of soccer season. She even won the game, a real cherry on top.

“When there's nothing to lose…” Katara sings, but Kya has stopped singing and frowns at the road ahead.

“What is he doing?”

“And there's nothing to prove…” The radio is the only sound in the second before the larger truck collides into their small minivan, crumpling it like a tin can and shaking them around. Miraculously, the radio escapes unscathed, and as Katara’s vision goes dark and she falls into a pit of oblivion, she hears the tinny notes of the song continue.

“And I’m dancing with myself…”

* * *

The locker slams shut, ringing in the emptiness of the school. Almost no one is still left this late, and Katara’s steps echo on the linoleum flooring as she walks down the hallway. She waves to Aunt Wu through the open doors of the auditorium, who’s hanging up the outfits Katara finished altering.

She must have finally called off rehearsal for the leads _,_ Katara notes, and yes, there’s a few people grabbing their bags from the auditorium seats. Exiting the building, there’s a couple more sitting under the roof waiting to be picked up. One of the girls is on Suki’s lacrosse team, the Warriors, and she waves at Katara.

“Need a ride?” she calls. What is her name? She struggles to recall. All of the Warriors seem to blend together in Katara’s mind, as bad as it sounds.

“I’m good, thanks!” Katara turns, hoisting her backpack higher on her shoulders and starting the walk back to her house. Passing the sports field, she waves at Sokka, who is still at soccer practice.

He waves back happily, only to immediately get beaned in the head with a ball. Katara can’t help laughing at his misfortune, and he sticks the middle finger out at her. Katara just throws it back and continues walking. She’s passing the senior parking lot behind the school when a red car pulls up besides her and honks.

“Zuko.”

There he is, sitting in his little sports car looking smug. He’s wearing a hoodie and jeans, a marked change from the crisp sweaters, button downs and pressed khakis of his past. Ever since the working conditions scandal at Sozin Corp., combined with the child abuse reports, his father has been in jail, conniving away with lawyers and trying to finagle a way out of additional jail tail. With Ozai out of the way, Zuko’s been living with his Uncle Iroh above The Jasmine Dragon. He’s mellowed out a lot, Katara admits, but she still can’t help but hold a little resentment over how he bullied Aang. She knows it was just anger over being removed from his fancy boarding school while his sister still got to go, and that it was all Ozai’s fault really, but when someone spends two years shoving your friend up against walls, it’s hard to forgive and forget.

She’s forced to hang out with him now, though, because somehow, he’s become one of Sokka’s best friends. They’d all thought he was a jerk, but when he and Sokka were the only two seniors in a class on the prison system and unfairly incarcerated people, they were forced to hang out. Zuko had become a lot more chill over the summer, having moved out to Iroh’s, and Sokka actually got along with him well. And who Sokka gets along with, Suki gets along with. Aang, being the forgiving, innocent, naive kid that he is, immediately accepted Zuko’s apology. Toph too, latched on, surprising Katara. “He doesn’t baby me because I’m blind,” Toph explained, and yeah, that made sense. So now, it’s all one big happy family: Zuko, Sokka, Suki, Aang, Toph, and her. Oh, and Appa, Toph’s giant White Tibetian Mastiff seeing eye dog. And, if she’s including Appa, she can’t forget Momo, Aang’s ferret.

Only Katara seemed to have any shred of common sense about her. Zuko had been rude for years! How was she supposed to forgive him right away?! And really, she always grumbled, it’s only been senior year. He could still go back.

“Kit Kat! What’s up?”

She smiled politely, hiding the annoyance she felt at seeing his perfect white teeth and his perfect hair and his perfect car. Plus he used that idiotic nickname. Only Sokka could use that. 

“Just walking home.” Would he take the hint?

“Cool. Were you at rehearsal? I thought Aunt Wu only had the leads stay this late.” No. He didn’t take the hint. And he just had to bring up the fact that _he_ was a lead, and she wasn’t. Not that she wanted to be one, she was so busy, but that’s not the point.

“I was doing a bit of altering for the costumes. She asked me to help out so the money we saved can go to the new upholstery.”

“Oh yeah.” He nodded. “We really need some. I think like five different kids pissed their pants last year when we did _Jekyll & Hyde.” _

She refused to laugh. Okay, maybe a small one. “Yeah, plus all the gum on the seats. You have to check every one before putting a bag down!”

“True.” A car pulled up behind him and beeped, another student trying to leave school. He ignored it. “You want a ride?”

“No,” she snapped. “I mean, no thank you.”

Zuko looked almost downcast. He was really trying to get her to like him. The car beeped again, more insistently. “Alright. Well, I’ll see you around.”

“Yup.”

He frowned. “Bye Katara.”

“Bye.” She watched his lights drive away before starting to walk.

* * *

It was pouring and Katara was not in a good mood.

It was coming down like bullets, the start of a tropical storm set to last a week or two. Her day had already been terrible. Pakku had been beastly in AP World, imbuing misogyny into his lesson, and Han and his cronies were horrible, backing him up and saying things about feminists that made her want to murder someone. Then, she had to go visit her chemistry teacher for test prep during lunch, her only free, so she didn’t get to eat. And that was all for nothing considering how the test went. Being soaked to the bone, her shirt and skirt clinging to her as she considered the long walk ahead, was just the _perfect_ ending.

She’d forgotten her rain jacket in her locker, closing it and exiting the school before she remembered it wasn’t in her backpack, but piled on the bottom of her locker so it wouldn’t get water on all her books. Although she’d remembered as soon as she had stepped outside, it didn’t help her any. The only people left in the school were the basketball team and the night janitor, and they couldn’t hear her pounding on the door all the way from the gym. She’d initially refused to walk home in the storm without a jacket, and had even gone so far as to text Jet, her asswipe of an ex-boyfriend who happened to be on the basketball team, but he hadn’t responded. He had probably stuck his phone away for practice. After waiting desperately for a response outside the big glass doors of the school for ten minutes, she had given up and set off.

So now she was stuck in the rain, with her bag (and likely her books, too) setting soaked. And she’d only walked five of the twenty minutes it took her to get home.

She was cursing the gods when a car pulled up next to her, stopping neatly on the side of the road. Katara felt like sobbing. Of all the people to see her looking like a wet rat it had to be him.

The roof was up today, but he rolled down a window.

“Katara? Is that you?”

“Yes,” she said grumpily.

“Agni, you look terrible.”

“Thanks.”

He cringed. “No I mean-“

“It was pretty clear what you meant,” she snaps.

“Sorry.” She didn’t bother acknowledging that. “You want a ride?”

She hesitated for a split second. “No.”

“Katara.” She hated how he was looking at her, pitying. “You’re going to freeze.”

“I’m fine.”

“I’ll drive slow.”

Katara sucked in a breath, her heart aching. She looked down at the ground, worrying her bottom lip. Could she really do it? But she knew if she walked home without a rain jacket, she probably would get sick, and she couldn’t have that, not with everything she had going on. At that moment, her backpack, of which she had repaired the bottom too many times, decided to split open, dumping her books everywhere.

Wordlessly, she opened the door, shoved her carcass of a backpack in along with her now-wet books, and slid inside, her heart picking up as she took in the familiar feeling of being in a car.

He smiled cautiously, his good eye slitting closed to match the scarred one. Reaching over to buckle herself in with white fingers, Katara’s clothes squelched on the seat. A funny expression passed across Zuko’s face as he looked at the scared, dripping girl, although Katara didn’t see it.

“I have my gym clothes in the back, if you want to change…”

Her disgust shocked her out of the stasis her fear had put in her. “Eww no! I don’t want your sweaty gym clothes!”

Zuko recoiled. “No, they’re new! It’s just-” He paused. “The seats. They’re leather, and I don’t want them to get ruined.”

Katara glared. “What, my peasant ass gonna stain them?”

“You’re dripping,” he said dryly.

She looked down, noting the puddle of water that had collected on the mat from. “Oh.”

“Yeah.”

She blushed, but climbed through the middle of the seats into the back. “Where’s the bag?” He pointed out a Nike duffle on the ground. “Close your eyes,” she said, but she noted that he already had his eyes firmly squeezed shut. Huh. A point in his favor. Not such a sleazebag after all.

She wriggled into the clothes, choosing a pair of giant joggers and a hoodie that wouldn’t show that she wasn’t wearing anything underneath it. Leaving her sopping wet clothing in an old ice bag she found, she crawled back into the front seat, pulling her hair up into a ratty bun to avoid any more drips.

“You can look now.” She buckled herself in, holding tightly to the roof handle. The rain was coming down hard, making a thunderous roar in the car.

“Are you good to go?” Zuko asked respectfully. She stopped clenching her teeth long enough to answer a quiet affirmation, and he turned the car on. Along with a blast of the heater, music began playing, some sort of rap song, and Katara jumped.

“Actually, can you turn that off?”

“The music?” She nodded, shivering, and he pressed pause quickly. “Sure.”

He shifted into drive, and the car started along slowly.

It was a quiet ride. Just the constant pounding of the rain, the breeze of the heater, and Katara’s slightly too fast breathing.

When they pulled up to the door of Katara and Sokka’s small house, she felt like a burden had been lifted. Her heart still felt like it was caught in a vise grip, but she had ridden in a car for the first time since the accident, and she hadn’t panicked. It was a win, and right now? Katara would take all the wins she could get.

**Author's Note:**

> Here's chapter 1! I hope you all enjoyed it. I don't have an update schedule yet, because Zutara Week has made me allllll discombobulated, but after it's over I plan to get back to this and start updating regularly. 
> 
> Thanks for reading! Comments and kudos are appreciated, and you can come say hi on Tumblr at pipthemagnificentwrites.


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